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Review

The 3-D animated ParaNorman was made by the same stop-motion studio responsible for 2009’s creepily visionary Coraline,
and, beyond their unsettling imagery and children’s horror-fantasy
themes, both films share an eerie sense of quiet: There’s surprisingly
little ambient sound in these films, almost as if the filmmakers forgot
to record room tone. It’s a little distracting, but not necessarily in a
bad way: It adds to the unease, not to mention the odd feeling that
what we’re watching is happening inside the characters’ heads.

That sealed-in quality is particularly appropriate for ParaNorman,
as it’s about an introverted 11-year-old who’d rather watch schlocky
horror flicks on TV instead of interacting with the outside world. More
pertinently, Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can also see and talk
to dead people; the ghost of his dead grandmother understands him way
better than his very much alive parents. This gets him labeled a freak,
even though he actually lives in Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts, whose
main claim to fame is a history of witch hunts and its main tourist
attraction the statue of a witch executed there centuries ago. Said
witch allegedly put a curse on the town, and sure enough, Norman is
starting to have ominous visions, feeding the suspicion that the witch
is about to return and sic an army of the undead upon the fallen burgh.
Meanwhile, zombies are coming out of the grave, and Norman realizes that
he might be the only person who can save Blithe Hollow.

There’s a lot of potential there for some seriously crazy imagery, but interestingly, ParaNorman
doesn’t try to make our eyes pop with visual invention. Rather, it
recreates the handmade, low-rent quality of the B-movie horror flicks it
honors — so that the 3-D animated ghouls kind of look like bad actors
in bad makeup staggering around listlessly. That’s a genuine risk in an
era where animated films appear to be in a kind of technological arms
race with each other, each trying to out-wow the other. Coraline
itself was something truly striking — a new kind of elemental nightmare,
shot like a storybook come to terrifying life — whereas ParaNorman
feels lived-in, suffused with comfortable nostalgia. In many ways, it
feels as withdrawn and modest as its morose, uncomfortable hero.

That can only take you so far, however. The movie feels aimless
at times, perhaps because it also doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Luckily, there’s also plenty of irreverent humor to get us through the
night, and, in the final act, a surprising amount of pathos — especially
as Norman finds out what truly happened to the so-called witch. But in
the end, perhaps the most touching quality of this film is its low-key,
but sensitively rendered portrait of a young, awkward child who hasn’t
quite managed to figure his way out in the world yet. Not to put too
fine a point on it, but anybody who was once a lonely boy glued to
creature features on TV may well find themselves quite moved by this
ambling, charming film.
— Bilge Ebiri

Transcendent: This visually inventive 3-D animated
film, from the folks who made Coraline, is a lot
more subdued than you might expect, almost
melancholy—which makes it surprisingly powerful.